Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Well, thank fuck: it seems as if people may finally be ready to start paying a bit more attention to the history of music in Toronto. It's about bloody time. Recently, there have been a whole series of popular projects exploring the city's music scenes from days gone by: from the sounds of 1960s Yorkville (Before The Gold Rush) to the rock and soul of the Yonge Street Strip (Yonge Street: Toronto Rock & Roll Stories) to 1970s Queen Street punk (Treat Me Like Dirt). Not to mention, *ahem*, the Toronto Historical Jukebox.

And now there's the epic, three-hour punk doc The Last Pogo Jumps Again. It's playing on the big screen this week for what may very well be the last time. You can catch it at the Royal tonight (Feb. 26 at 9pm) and on Sunday afternoon (March 2 at 4pm).

It's from Colin Brunton — the same filmmaker who was there to capture the legendary "Last Pogo" show at the Horseshoe back in 1978 — and Kire Paputts. But while the original was a concert film, this is a full-on exploration of the entire punk scene that flourished in Toronto during the late 1970s. In those years, our city was producing some of the very best punk rock in the entire world, with bands just as good as some of the ones getting famous in London and New York. The Last Pogo Jumps Again introduces you to many of them — The Viletones, The Diodes, Teenage Head, The Curse, The Ugly, The Scenics, The 'B' Girls, The Government, The Mods, The Demics, The Dishes... on and on and on — and to the people who helped build the scene. If you don't already know the music, the film makes for a jaw-dropping education. If you do, the footage and the anecdotes are essential viewing. Steven Leckie of The Viletones performs with blood streaming down his arms. The makers of the Pig Paper zine tell the story of stealing their first typewriter. The Curse wear bikinis made of tampons. There are brawls and drugs and police raids and outrage. And, through it all, a staggering burst of creativity.

But the documentary doesn't stop there. While the greatest punk bands from the scenes in London and New York landed major records deals, toured the world, got rich and had long careers, pretty much none of the bands in Toronto ever found that kind of financial success. The few who did make it onto major labels either got screwed over or screwed it up. And those were a very lucky few: the record industry — and many fans — just didn't take Canadian music seriously. The Last Pogo Jumps Again explores the consequences: the film's present-day interviews with the aging punks don't just look back on the scene, but also show what's happened to some of them in the 35 years since. You follow The Viletones' Freddie Pompeii as he picks up his methadone. You watch the late Frankie Venom of Teenage Head nodding off during a radio interview. In one scene, Leckie picks a fight in a coffee shop. In another, he's not even sure where he is.

Today, bands from Toronto are among the most famous bands in the world. And they aren't forced to leave the city in order to make it big. (Hell, I saw members of Broken Social Scene and The Hidden Cameras at a gig in a small club just last night.) The punks of the late 1970s don't get to enjoy it, but they helped make it happen: by staying in our city, by fighting for their rightful place in our culture, by influencing the generations who would follow. It's not an exaggeration to say they changed Toronto. And that, I think, is important to remember. The Last Pogo Jumps Again is a very good place to start.

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Again, the film is screening at the Royal tonight (Feb. 26 at 9pm) and on Sunday afternoon (March 2 at 4pm). A DVD release is planned for the summer. The official website is here.

If you want to listen to some of the bands, I've linked all those band names above with stuff on YouTube.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

As Hadley lay awake beside him, desperately pregnant and uncomfortable, Ernest Hemingway dreamed that it was raining. It had been raining for days, coming down in vast, endless torrents. It hammered at the treetops and at the ground and at the tiles of the roofs in a steady, wet roar.

It rained so hard for so long that Castle Frank Brook swelled and broke its banks. It climbed up the sides of the valley, swamped muddy Bathurst Street and rose higher still. Soon it was spilling in through the open window and lapping up against the edges of their bed.

With the flood came great fish that swam up from the lake. They glided by through the murky water; an enormous old sturgeon circled the dresser and chairs, eyeing Hemingway with an ancient gaze. It seemed as if at any moment, the beast would speak, tell forgotten stories, tales of Huron and Iroquois and of mammoths and wolves. But instead, it opened its jaws, swam toward the bed and swallowed it whole: the sheets, the mattress, the headboard, and Hemingway and Hadley with them, all tumbling down into a dark, fishy abyss.

Monday, February 17, 2014

This year's rather wintry winter weather inspired me to spend some time searching online through winter photos on the Toronto Archives website over the holidays. Here's one of my favourites. It's a shot of a horse ploughing along Cherry Street during the winter of 1909.

I have very little else to say about it, but here's a fun fact thanks to Wikipedia and The Canadian Entomologist: Cherry Street was the site of the very first termite infestation in the history of Ontario. They probably arrived from the United States and first made their presence known on a dock along the southern stretch of Cherry — the part that's now in the Portlands. I suspect that's the bit of the street where this photo was taken, too. Though, the termites didn't arrive until 30 years later.

Cherry Street is currently in the process of getting its own tiny streetcar line as part of the development of the waterfront. It'll be three stops long and run along its own separated lanes through the heart of the Canary District (the new neighbourhood being built north of the Portlands, next to the already-open Corktown Common, which will start out as the Athletes Village for the Pan Am Games). Hopefully, when the Portlands are developed the Cherry streetcar will run further south, too.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

It all started in 1981 at the Hyde Park Hotel in London, England. Jim Henson was there with some of his writers and puppeteers. For the last five extraordinary years, The Muppet Show had been filmed in a nearby studio, but now it was coming to an end. Henson wanted to brainstorm ideas for a new children's television series. This one was going be even more ambitious. Years later, one of the puppeteers remembered the moment it all began: "Jim walked into the room and said, ‘I want to do a show that will change the world and end war.'" That'show Fraggle Rock started.

For three straight days Henson and his team worked on the concept for the show, which would continue to evolve over the next few months. Fraggle Rock would be about peace and understanding; it would teach children that everyone has a different perspective, that even the scariest monsters have thoughts and feelings of their own. Colourful Muppets living in an underground world would see that their lives were connected to the lives of others — whether it was the huge and terrifying Gorgs, the tiny construction worker Doozers, or the humans of "Outer Space."

"By seeing how the various groups in the world of Fraggle Rock learn
to deal with their differences," Henson explained, "perhaps we can learn a little bit about how to
deal with ours."

It was a message that was urgently needed in those Cold War years, particularly since the Reagan White House had just deregulated children's television, prompting a flood of violent programming meant to sell action figures (stuff like G.I. Joe, He-Man and Transformers). And Fraggle Rock wasn't just going to be for kids in North America, either. It was going to be one of the very first international co-productions — specifically structured to connect with the lives of children all over the world. In the United States and Canada, the hole in the wall that led to Fraggle Rock would be found in the workshop of an inventor. In England, it was in a lighthouse. In France, a bakery. Over the course of the next few years, the show would be broadcast in more than 90 countries and translated into 13 different languages. Henson's message of peace and understanding would have a truly global audience.

And so, they decided to film Fraggle Rock in one of the most multicultural cities on earth: Toronto. "Given
the show's commitment to interdependence and a global consciousness," one of the producers later said, "I
can't imagine it being filmed anywhere else."

"When we came up with the idea of doing it in Canada we all just loved it," Henson once agreed. "It seems right for the program."

By that point, Henson already had a long history in Canada; he'd been shooting in Toronto since the 1960s. Usually, he'd use the Robert Lawrence Studios in Yorkville; that's where he filmed Muppet specials like Hey, Cinderella!, The Frog Prince and Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas. When he first came to Yorkville, the neighbourhood was still ground zero for Canadian '60s counterculture, filled with hippies, greasers and weekenders and some of the country's best poetry, folk music and rock & roll. The scene didn't last long — by the early 1970s, the City had teamed up with developers to replace the hippies with fancy boutiques and restaurants — but through it all, the TV studio survived. And Henson kept using it.

So that's where they filmed Fraggle Rock. The caverns of the Fraggles and the Doozers, the castle of the Gorgs, and the hole in the wall of Doc's workshop were all built on Yorkville Avenue — just east of Bay, one block north of Bloor. The neighbourhood that had once been home to the likes of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and William Gibson was now home to a whole other kind of eccentric Bohemian peacenik: The Muppets.

For the next four years, some of the Muppets' greatest performers were hard at work in Toronto trying to make a puppet show so awesome it would change the world.

Three of the Fraggle puppeteers were relative newcomers to the Muppet family. Kathryn Mullen, who performed as Mokey Fraggle, had most notably been responsible for Kira the Gelfling in The Dark Crystal — and had assisted Franz Oz with Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. Karen Prell, who was doing Red Fraggle, had played some minor roles on Sesame Street. Steve Whitmire, who did Wembley Fraggle, had worked on The Muppet Show, mostly taking on minor characters like Rizzo The Rat.

The three other puppeteers performing major roles on Fraggle Rock were already responsible for some of the popular Muppet characters ever:

Dave Goelz was the human behind Boober Fraggle and Uncle Traveling Matt. Before that, he was The Great Gonzo and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew on The Muppet Show, along with Zoot, the saxophonist from The Electric Mayhem band. He got an apartment in Yorkville just a couple of blocks from the studio (on Hazelton Avenue). His first adventure with Uncle Traveling Matt was filmed right outside the studio (on Scadding Avenue). Many of his adventures took place in Toronto, along with locations all over the world. At one point, he claims the CN Tower — "The ultimate Doozer construction. It looked absolutely delicious, but it tasted terrible." — in the name of Fragglekind.

Richard Hunt had been responsible for Beaker, Scooter, Sweetums and the heckling old Statler on The Muppet Show, as well as Janice from The Electric Mayhem band. On Fraggle Rock, he was one of two people tackling the role of Junior Gorg — the huge Gorg puppet was so complicated that two people were needed to operate it at all times. While Hunt was in town, he stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel just down the street (at the corner of Yorkville Avenue & Avenue Road).

Jerry Nelson & Gobo

Jerry Nelson was the human behind the star of Fraggle Rock — Gobo Fraggle — as well as Pa Gorg and Marjory The Trash Heap. On Sesame Street, he was The Count and the original Snuffleupagus. On The Muppet Show, he was Lew Zealand, Robin The Frog, Camilla The Chicken and Sgt. Floyd Pepper of The Electric Mayhem band. In honour of Canada, he gave Gobo a distinctly Canadian accent, complete with plenty of"eh"s. During his years in Toronto, he seems to have developed a particular fondest for The Pilot Tavern (on Cumberland near Yonge). "Jerry would often hold court at The Pilot with cast and crew members at the end of a busy week shooting the show," Prell (Red) later remembered, "regaling all assembled with songs, stories and jokes in a range of hilarious voices until the late hours."

Many of those members of the cast and crew were Torontonians. Some of them worked for the CBC. (Canada's public broadcaster was co-producing the show with ITV and HBO; it was one of the American cable network's very first original series.) Others were local writers, artists and musicians.

The producers had a particularly challenging task in finding someone to write the music for the show — the songs were going to be an incredibly important part of Fraggle Rock. Hundreds of Canadian musicians submitted their children's music. Jerry Juhl, who had been the head writer on The Muppet Show was taking on the same role with Fraggle Rock. His desk was piled high with hundreds of cassette tapes.

"I listened to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of songs that were children's songs," he later remembered, "[but] we were looking for Fraggle songs... And one morning the alarm went off in my hotel room, and I got up, and
before even going in to brush my teeth I picked up a cassette... shoved
it into the machine... And I just remember walking back into the bedroom, frozen, because for
the first time there was Fraggle music. It was so different."

The song was by Philip Balsam and Dennis Lee.

By then, Lee was already a famous Canadian poet. His children's book, Alligator Pie, became an instant classic when it was published in 1974. He'd co-founded the House of Anansi Press, played an important role in the experimental education at Rochdale College, and would go on to become Toronto's first ever Poet Laureate. He and Balsam were writing songs for fun; Balsam composed the music and Lee wrote the lyrics. But it was just a hobby. They hadn't even submitted the cassette for consideration; a CBC executive gave it to Juhl. When the Fraggle Rock writer offered them the job, he says Lee tried to talk him out of it. But Juhl was convinced the mix of innocence and wisdom was a perfect fit for the show. He wouldn't take no for an answer.

It was the beginning of an unbelievably productive period for the songwriting pair. Almost every single one of the 96 episodes of Fraggle Rock featured multiple songs. Balsam and Lee wrote almost all of them — an average of more than one song every week for more than four straight years. And they were good, too. "I can't remember ever rejecting a song," Juhl recalled years later. The Fraggle Rock theme song even became a Top 40 hit in the UK.

On occasion, Balsam would team up to write a song with another Torontonian poet: bpNichol. Most of Nichol's work was breathtakingly experimental: he was best-known for his visual concrete poetry and his performances of sound poems as a member of The Four Horsemen. But he became one of the main writers on Fraggle Rock, penning scripts along with a team that included several award-winning Canadian novelists, playwrights and screenwriters. They'd go on to work on everything from Sharon, Lois & Bram's Elephant Show to Street Legal to Little Mosque on the Prairie. "It wasn't the kind of staff that you would normally think would be assembled for a children's television show," Juhl admitted, "Because we, in fact, weren't
thinking of ourselves as a children's television show. We were trying not to label ourselves... we were looking for really
interesting people..."

Henson would also personally work on some episodes of Fraggle Rock. He directed several himself and performed a couple of relatively small recurring roles (Convincing John and Cantus The Minstrel). But for the most part, he spent the early 1980s focused on making and promoting his new movies: The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth and The Muppets Take Manhattan. And so, Fraggle Rock became the very first Muppet production that he didn't personally oversee on a day-to-day basis. Instead of spending all of his time in Toronto, Henson trusted the show to the all-star team he'd put together.

"I think we all felt a sense of pride about that," Nelson (Gobo) said. And the cast and crew took it to heart. Making the show was a process that took all seven days of the week; some of those days lasted long into the night. But by all accounts, it was incredible fun. Creativity ruled. Collaboration was everywhere: in the writers' room, in the songwriting, in the design of the sets and the characters, in the way two puppeteers were needed to bring many of the characters to life. In fact, a piece in The Awlrecently suggested that Fraggle Rock provides the template for "the ideal creative workplace." In articles and in interviews and on blogs, one after another after another, members of the cast and crew remember Fraggle Rock as the best job they ever had.

"We shared the values of the show, as you may expect," producer Larry Mirkin recalled, "but we also shared
the same values in how you go about creating a show... There was never an argument on the set. We all just believed that in order to make the show, we were going to make it by means of this joyful process."

It was still breaking new ground years after the final episode aired: in 1989, Fraggle Rock became the very first North American television series to be shown in the Soviet Union. Within months, the Iron Curtain had crumbled. "We always joke that Fraggle Rock led to the end of the Cold War," a Henson archivist later said. "By the end of the year, as the show's lessons of tolerance and
understanding wafted through the airwaves, the Berlin Wall came down."

The cast and crew who worked in Toronto during those years also continued to play an enormous role in the world of The Muppets beyond Fraggle Rock. When Henson was making Labyrinth, he had Dennis Lee write the first draft of the film's story. Four of the five main Fraggle puppeteers would all perform characters in the movie. And all five were there on the sad occasion of Henson's funeral, performing in character as part of a musical tribute in his memory. Goelz (Boober) and Whitmire (Wembley) would go on to star in The Muppet's Christmas Carol as Gonzo and Rizzo The Rat. Whitmire had only been in his early 20s when took on the role of Wembley Fraggle, worried that his career had already peaked; today, he's Kermit The Frog.

So, it wasn't really the end when Fraggle Rock finally stopped filming in 1986, but it was still a bittersweet moment. Henson wanted to end the show while it was still at the height of its power. The night after the final day on set, the cast and crew gathered for a wrap party a few blocks from the studio — at the Sutton Place Hotel at the corner of Bay & Wellesley (it's being turned into the Britt Condos now). That night, the show ended the same way it had always been made: with joy and creativity. The invitation to the party was covered in Doozers. A video showed what the Fraggles were going to do now — Red signed a contract to play hockey for the Leafs. Balsam and Lee wrote a new version of one of their songs, turning it into a farewell to the show sung by the Fraggles and their puppeteers. The crowd rose to its feet in applause and sang along.

Jim Henson gave a speech that night. At first, he joked around, did his Convincing John voice, had to wait for the whoops of laughter to die down. But the room grew quiet as he began to reminisce about his years in Yorkville and the work they'd done there. "This whole project of Fraggle has been a joy from the beginning," he said. "It's fun when you start out trying to do something that makes a positive statement... I think the body of work of Fraggle Rock is something that's going to stay around. And I think it's something we're all going to be proud of for a long time. And I think that's... that's really nice."

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Photo of Yorkville in 1966 via York University's Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections here. Photo of Dennis Lee via the Canadian Enyclopedia here (a promotional image by Susan Perly for Macmillan of Canada).

Read my post about the Torontonian roots of another children's show with a deep commitment to peace and understanding — Doctor Who — here. And William Gibson's time in Yorkville during the 1960s here.

You can watch the entire first episode of Fraggle Rock on YouTube here. And the second one here. A video of Henson's speech at the wrap party is here. His interview with the CBC from just after they announced Fraggle Rock would be shot in Toronto is here. You can watch the British opening to the show here and the German opening here. There's also a great 1987 documentary which goes behind the scenes of the show. And the DVDs have excellent interviews with some of the writers, producers and puppeteers. You can watch a Muppet tribute to Canada here. The speech Frank Oz gave at Henson's funeral is here. The musical tribute at the funeral, performed by Fraggle Rockers Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt, Dave Goelz and Steve Whitmire, along with Oz and Kevin Clash (Elmo), is here.

Ben Folds made a new music video featuring Fraggles, Rob Corddy and Anna Kendrick just a couple of years ago. You can watch it on YouTube here. Anna Kendrick's "Boy Gorg" t-shit is pretty much the best thing ever.The Awl writes about Fraggle Rock as the ideal creative workplace here. Al-Jazeera writes about how the show taught children about peace and understanding here. The AV Club writes about how the show taught children about society and community here. TIME Magazine shares "10 Things You Didn't Know About Fraggle Rock" here.

You can read excerpts from the relatively new Jim Henson biography on Google Books here, buy it on Amazon here, or borrow it from the Toronto Public Library here. The Henson archives shares stories about the brief entries in Henson's diary, The Red Book, here. (It's full of information about his ties to Toronto, like here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.)

There's a Fraggle Rock-oriented Google Map of Yorkville put together by an American Muppet blogger, Jessica Max Stein, based on a walking tour by the show's former producer, Lawrence Mirkin, here. The tip about the location of Uncle Traveling Matt's first adventure in Yorkville comes from a message board here. The owner of those buildings, which are listed for a heritage designation, is apparently planning on tearing them down (if they haven't been already). You can watch that first Uncle Traveling Matt adventure on YouTube here. And there's a behind-the-scenes photo of Goelz performing as Uncle Traveling Matt that day here.

Steve Whitmire shares some of his memories of Fraggle Rock here. Karen Prell shared her memories of working with Jerry Nelson after he passed away in 2012 on her site here. Another Fraggle Rock puppeteer, Robo Mills, did the same on his site here.(He's still in Toronto and tweets from here.) Crew member and director Wayne Moss talks about the show's seven-day working schedule here. Michael K. Frith, who designed the characters, talks about that process on YouTube here.

You can read more about the deregulation of children's television by the Reagan administration here and here. A famous quote from Mark Fowler, Reagan's head of the FCC, goes like this: "It's time to move away from thinking of broadcasters as trustees and
time to treat them the way that everyone else in this society does, that
is, as a business. Television is just another appliance. It's a toaster
with pictures."

This is post replaces an earlier, much shorter one, in which I mistakenly believed that Fraggle Rock was filmed in the CBC Studios on Jarvis Street.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

A couple of weeks go, I had the chance to talk to Peter Goffin from Torontoist about the new additions to the Dreams Project I launched last year: The Toronto Historical Jukebox (the blog where I share songs from the history of the city and the stories behind them) and The Toronto Historical Bathroom Sticker Jukebox (where I stick links to those songs up in the bathrooms of music venues around the city).